Tag Archives: art exhibits

Giertz Gallery at Parkland College is celebrating Parkland’s 50th anniversary by hosting its first-ever alumni juried exhibition, featuring the artwork of our most talented alumni! Are you one of them?

Giertz Gallery invites Art and Design alumni to show your creativity and talent by submitting artwork to the Parkland College 50th: Art and Design Alumni Exhibition.

All works to be considered for inclusion in the exhibit must be submitted by August 26. Visit parkland.edu/gallery for complete details and the online entry form.

Entry is open to all artists who have taken at least one class within the Art and Design program at Parkland. Submitted works may be in the following disciplines: painting, sculpture, ceramics, metals, drawing, printmaking, photography, textiles, video, and mixed media. Work completed under an instructor’s supervision is not eligible. Work must have been made in the last three years.

We are delighted that Barry Blinderman, director of University Galleries at Illinois State University, will serve as juror of the exhibition.

Parkland College 50th: Art and Design Alumni Exhibition will run September 26–November 5, 2016.

“Ornithology” exhibit features works by artists Monique Luchetti (left) and Barbara Kendrick.

Ornithology: Works by Barbara Kendrick and Monique Luchettiruns through Saturday, November 7, at Giertz Gallery.

This exhibition has been a hit at the gallery so far! A reception took place Thursday, October 1, with a brief gallery talk by both artists and musical performance by the Parkland Guitar Ensemble. People who attended the event were able to hear about the artwork firsthand.

Barbara and Monique have a fascination and sympathy with birds, but their work is divergent in concepts, material, and process. Although the artists take different approaches in their body of work, they both use images of birds to speak to the ways our lives are inextricably tied together, interdependent and bound to the earth for survival.

“We are alive in a world where the distinction between what we know to be human and what we believe to be animal is shrinking,” the artists have said about their exhibit.

And speaking of birds…

Quasi the Screech Owl from the Anita Purvis Nature Center.

In addition to the artist lectures, and in tandem with Parkland College’s Sustainable Campus Committee, there will be a special program titled “Owls and Avian Adaptations” on Tuesday, October 20 from 1:15 to 2:15 p.m. in the Gallery Lounge. Savannah Donovan from the Urbana Park District’s Anita Purves Nature Center will introduce you to Quasi the Eastern screech owl.

Savannah will show you the amazing adaptations that allow owls to thrive in darkness. You will also get to see other avian specimens for comparison. October is Campus Sustainability Month, and the Sustainable Campus Committee will be hosting a series of activities and events throughout the month at Parkland. Please visit the Parkland College website for more information.

Now, back to the “Ornithology” exhibit!

Barbara Kendrick is a local artist and a retired professor from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She admires birds’ ability to survive and adapt to new, sometimes hostile environments. The way they build nests in the alphabet of signs on storefronts, or gather cigarette butts to line their nests, informs her collages. As she makes her work, she tries to match her own sense of improvisation with that of the birds. Each collage opens up new questions about our connection to the way the birds live in our world.

Monique Luchetti, a Brooklyn-based studio artist, sifts through museums’ ornithology collections as if they were cemeteries, gleaning the identities of the birds for her drawings, preserved and tagged by humans for further study. Her drawings are a meditation of loss and remembering and on the contradiction inherent in humans: racing to collect, classify, and catalog species while continuing to haplessly destroy the same species through climate change and the devastation of the planet’s forests and oceans.

Barbara was recently interviewed by Melissa Merli at the News-Gazette; during the interview, she said, “In my own work, there has to be a sense of surprise and discovery or I get bored… Now I use found materials for the collages. I use everything. I grab images off the Internet. I use magazines. I use books. Lately I’ve been taking my own photographs. These are ink-jet prints. I read an essay about parakeets in the bare nerve garden and that was such an image to me. So I went on the Internet and found images of neurons and dendrites and printed them and took images of parakeets and put them in them among the dendrites.”

Giertz Gallery at Parkland College hours are10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Thursday and noon to 2 p.m. Saturday.

To find the gallery when classes are in session, we suggest using the M6 parking lot on the north corner of the campus. Enter through door X-7, turn left, and follow the ramps uphill to the highest point of the first floor, where the gallery is located. The gallery windows overlook the outdoor fountain area.

Programs at the gallery are partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency. Parkland College is a section 504/ADA-compliant institution; for accommodation, call 217/351-2505.